Abstract: Emily Dickinson （1830－1886）, American poet, is considered one of the vibrates poets in American literature. Her unique, gemlike lyrics are distillations of profound feeling and original intellect that stand outside the mainstream of 19th－century American literature. Dickinson wrote 1775 poems. Dickinson never intended any of them to be published; she wrote, not for the sake of art, but rather to express her emotions about life. Many of Dickinson’s works are written in free verse and are short, their shortness inspires readers to have a deeper thought process to understand them and many demand a second look. Emily could take her thoughts, beliefs, and emotions and transform them into words and then into a poem that was truly from her heart. Most of Dickinson’s focus was on nature, life, immortality, and the mind; however, she was extremely interested in writing about death and love. As a result, Dickinson’s obsessions with achieving an understanding of death and illustrating the power of love dominate her poetry
Key Words: nature, symbol, death, transcendentalism, religion
I The use of symbols in her nature poems
Nature appears widely and frequently in her work. Nature, for her, is usually bright and dark mystery, only occasionally illuminated by flashes of pantheism and sometimes darkened by hopeless fatality. She read a lot of poems of Romantic poets and it made her look for meaning, symbol, imagery and spiritual refreshment in nature. Although her direct observations were confined to meadows, forests, hills, flowers, and a quite small range of creatures, these just provided symbols that quite suitable to her own feeling and conflicts in her deep heart and mind. Dickinson sees nature as benevolent but cruel and perhaps destructive.
Symbols used by Dickinson seem to make her nature poems ambiguous and difficult to understand, but in deeper, livelier, more vivid and more philosophical. In literary usage, however, a symbol is a specially evocative kind of image： that is, a word or phrase referring to a concrete object, scene, or action which also has some further significance associated with it： flowers, mountains, birds, and voyages have all been used as common symbols. For instance, in “IT SIEFS FROM LEADEN SIEVES“, snow is used as a symbol of both death and impermanence, in “A NARROW FELLOW IN THE GRASS“, the snake is the symbol of evil.
II Death theme in Emily Dickson’s poetry
Emily had experienced death first hand much more than a person of today’s society which caused her to think about its mystery. Her poetry presents both Puritan and Christian beliefs, but she was also attracted to the new age science that was being discovered around her. She then wrote a poem entitled, “I Heard a Fly buzz- When I Died-”, where the narrator, who is already dead, is hearing his own funeral. He starts by listening to the mourners as they pass his body, but a little fly buzzing catches his attention. “Dickinson both asserts and refutes, we are, when contemplatively, attentively reading this poem, brought into confrontation not just with our world or the mystery of what lies beyond it, but with the mystery of our world”. Dickinson uses a break in the verse in her first line of the poem to draw attention to the phrase “When I died”. The fly represents all of the small things in a person’s life that could not be heard in life, but only after death.? It can also be seen “as death itself, for only seconds before the speaker dies, the fly interposes itself “between the light’ and me.” It is a fact that everything must die, and Dickinson believed that if death was accepted, the small parts of life that would hold a deeper meaning would finally be noticed. III. Transcendentalism in Emily’s Nature Poetry
Transcendentalism made Dickinson absorbed in nature. NDuring her reclusion, she viewed nature as her sole companion and always wandered with her dog in the embrace of the beautiful nature. Dickinson often presented nature in the best transcendental manner.
Everything bore a second sense and an ulterior sense. Only when one is totally intoxicated in nature and achieves a harmonious relationship with it, can he or she perceive the higher truth in it. Dickinson proclaimed her transcendental philosophy in this poetry: go to the nature to sink back into its influence, and in doing so you can transcend the empirical world and become spiritually whole
Some poems of Emily Dickinson seem to be transcendental, yet not quite. She appears to search for the universal truths and investigate the circumstances of the human condition: sense of life, immortality, God, faith, place of man in the universe. Emily Dickinson questions absolutes and her argumentation is multisided. The poetic technique that she uses involves making abstract concrete, which creates a striking imagery like that of a hand of the wind combing the Sky.
IV Images of Religious Exclusion in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson constantly presented herself as being at odds with both nature and religion. Her condensed style employs deceptively simple language to hide rich and myriad layers of meaning and her poetry is often expressive of the desire for exclusion, to stay away from a masculine God whom she appeared to regard as cruel and unforgiving. The language used by Dickinson is sparse and austere, but this has the paradoxical effect of rendering the emotions expressed within it as strong, passionate and deeply-felt. Dickinson’s poem “Why did they shut me out of Heaven?” is just such an example.
The evocation of the apple in biblical mythology is indicative of knowledge and sin; the original act of sin occurs in the desire for the apple/knowledge and Dickinson unapologetically owns up to the ‘sin’ of desiring the apple which is turned into ‘Heaven’ all the time it remains unreachable. The trope of Heaven as a symbol for what is out of reach is a theme in the poetry of Emily Dickinson; what is also pertinent is that ‘Heaven’ is not always what the speaker desires, or alternatively it ceases to be the object of desire in the course of the struggle to attain it.
Dickinson fluently articulates the condition of the exile, but she does not necessarily regard exclusion itself as an adverse situation, and frequently and intentionally assumes the role of the outsider. Dickinson’s work is permeated with a tantalizing sense of secrecy; something is always on the verge of being revealed, but remains an enigma. Conclusion
A poet who took definition as her province, Emily Dickinson challenged the existing definitions of poetry and the poet"s work. Like writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, she experimented with expression in order to free it from conventional restraints. Like writers such as Charlotte Bront? and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she crafted a new type of persona for the first person. To make the abstract tangible, to define meaning without confining it, to inhabit a house that never became a prison, Dickinson created in her writing a distinctively elliptical language for expressing what was possible but not yet realized. Like the Concord Transcendentalists whose works she knew well, she saw poetry as a double-edged sword. While it liberated the individual, it as readily left him ungrounded. The literary marketplace, however, offered new ground for her work in the last decade of the nineteenth century.
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